IBM Says It's Official: The Web Is Insecure

IBM has just released its X-Force 2009 Mid-Year Trend and Risk Report on risks, and the report says that the Web is insecure. According to the report, the number of malicious links in the first half of 2009 has risen by 508 percent. The report also points to the fact that the malicious links are not just coming from untrusted sites and malicious domains. The end result, IBM says, is that the Web is like the wild, wild west and no one is to be trusted. This supports an earlier observation that most Web sites are vulnerable.

I find this report analogous to the weather people using sonar, radar, and computer models to predict the weather for the day -- when all they have to do is look outside.

Some of the statistics cited in the report:

SQL injection attacks rose 50 percent

Attacks targeting PDF files are at an all-time high

Trojans account for more than half of all new malware

66 percent of phishing attacks targeted the financial industry

Online payments targets made up 31 percent of the attacks

I totally agree with what the report said. If you own a computer and use the Internet, you probably have lived through a lot of this. You may have even been part of the statistics. The problem is, many other reports have given us similar information so I don't think the report has really told us anything new. Maybe IBM should spend its money on something else. Or next time, it could just ask any computer user.

As far as the weather, George Carlin said it best, "dark, continued dark overnight with widely scattered light by morning." And he didn't even need a computer.